#WorldsFair64: The New York State Pavilion and Its Second Chance at Life
This architectural oddity from the New York World’s Fair still stands today.
by Rich Watson
Flushing Meadows-Corona Park hosted two World’s Fairs, in 1939-40 and 1964-65. Evidence of their existence remains, but as a kid growing up in Queens, I didn’t recognize it as such.
Later in life I learned about the Fairs. I discovered the New York State Pavilion, one of the 1964 Fair’s biggest attractions, was being resuscitated from obscurity.
The three components of the New York State Pavilion
The NYSP lies between the Unisphere, to the north, and the Long Island Expressway, to the south, connected by the Court of Nations. The New Jersey Pavilion, gone now, sat in between.
Three elements make up the Pavilion:
The Tent of Tomorrow, a round structure with sixteen pillars supporting a cable suspension roof colored red, orange and pink. It was the largest such suspension roof in the world at the time of its construction. A nine thousand-square-foot Texaco highway map of New York State was on the floor, made of terrazzo mosaic panels. During the Fair it hosted fashion shows, children’s rides, art shows and entertainers.
Three observation towers, eighty-five, one hundred sixty and two hundred twenty-six feet. Each one had elevators leading to their observation platforms. From the tallest tower, you could see not only the fairgrounds, but Long Island, the tri-state area and the Atlantic Ocean.
Theaterama, a small performance space with a circular auditorium. During the Fair, the audience would watch a three-sixty-degree travelogue of New York State projected onto screens. It’s the current home of the Queens Theater.
The New York Times’ architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable called the Pavilion “a runaway success, day or night… seriously and beautifully constructed.”
Architect Philip Johnson
Philip Johnson, with Richard Foster, designed the NYSP. Johnson was the first director of the Museum of Modern Art’s architecture department. Among his achievements prior to the Fair include the Seagram Building on Park Avenue in Manhattan, Lincoln Center’s David Koch Theater, and Johnson’s Connecticut residence, the Glass House.
Later in life he would design buildings elsewhere in Manhattan and around the country, plus Spain.
Foster was a frequent collaborator of Johnson’s.
New York governor Nelson Rockefeller commissioned the NYSP. Johnson’s plan for the Fair was to make “an unengaged free space as an example of the greatness of New York, rather than as a warehouse full of exhibit material.” By the end of the Fair in 1965, an estimated six million fairgoers went to the Pavilion.
NYSP and Andy Warhol
In addition to the events inside the Tent, artwork by a who’s who of postmodern artists hung outside Theaterama, commissioned by Johnson. Among those artists included a young Andy Warhol.
His contribution was a mural of silkscreened mug shots of the New York Police Department’s most wanted criminals. Despite some criticism prior to the Fair’s opening, Johnson called Thirteen Most Wanted Men “a comment on the sociological factor in American life.”
Days later, however, Johnson asked Warhol for a replacement mural. Warhol blamed Fair director Robert Moses for the switch. He had the power to censor any Fair exhibit that was of “extreme bad taste or low standard.” He had already used it to remove one piece.
Warhol had the Fair paint over his mural in silver. He made a second silkscreen out of twenty-five copies of a Moses photograph. Johnson, though, vetoed this one.
Despite his statements to the press, Johnson later admitted Thirteen Most Wanted Men was removed at the request of Rockefeller. 1964 was an election year. The governor, Johnson said, wished to avoid any controversy stemming from the artwork, particularly from Italian-Americans; seven of the thirteen criminals were of Italian descent. Some dispute this account.
The publicity helped Warhol. His latest exhibition opened April 21, the night before the Fair’s opening. It was a great success.
Someone commemorated the whole affair in 1998 with a Pavilion mosaic including Warhol’s silkscreen and a Moses mosaic credited to Warhol, placed in the Park.
In the Fair’s fiftieth anniversary year, 2014, the Queens Museum—the New York City Building during the Fair—hosted an exhibition that recreated Warhol’s work.
The post-Fair years and the NYSP’s decline
The NYSP, like all of the Fair’s exhibitors, signed a lease stating their pavilions would be torn down within ninety days of the Fair’s end, in October 1965. It, however, was too expensive to demolish. Some believe it used steel pilings in addition to wooden ones, but that has never been confirmed.
After the Fair, in 1969, the Pavilion became a concert venue. Among the acts that played there included the Grateful Dead, Muddy Waters, James Brown, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, and for two nights in August, Led Zeppelin.
The Pavilion was a roller rink during the early seventies. A clear plastic coating protected the Texaco map.
The city closed the Pavilion in 1974. For safety reasons, the ceiling tiles were taken out, leaving the terrazzo floor exposed to the weather. In time, it deteriorated, as did the rest of the Pavilion.
Growing up amidst the remnants of the World’s Fair
I was born in East Elmhurst, a short distance west of Flushing Meadow Park. I first went there on a regular basis in the mid-eighties, with my friends. Like many who come to the Park for the first time, we were drawn to the Unisphere. It’s in a central location, it’s open and prominent, and it has evolved into the symbol of Queens in general. We didn’t need any knowledge of the Fair to appreciate it for what it was, and is: a really cool-looking landmark we could play around.
The Pavilion, to my eyes, at least, could have been some manner of sculpture. I doubt I ever perceived it as something that used to be a building, open to the public. I certainly wasn’t curious to see inside. It was run-down, somewhat forbidding, and most importantly, closed. That part of the Park didn’t exist in my mind.
Years later I moved away from East Elmhurst and saw the Park less. Over time, I learned about the Fair and the Pavilion. I saw it in movies such as The Wiz, Men in Black and Iron Man 2.
Then, in 2014, the city commemorated the Fair’s fiftieth anniversary (and the original Fair’s seventy-fifth) with a festival in the Park, on the grounds across from the Pavilion.
I went and enjoyed it. I also saw the Pavilion from the inside for the first time. Despite its state, it was still impressive.
That day I learned the city would take a more active hand in restoring the Pavilion to a better state, if not to its complete former glory.
The road to restoration
Restoration of the NYSP began at least as far as 2009 with the beginning of an interior paint job. In 2015 the outer ring of the Tent was painted “government cheese” yellow. In 2017, the Pavilion received $14.25 million in funding. Two years later, the city officially broke ground.
Also, a 2016 competition gathered ideas for the future of the Pavilion. The submissions ranged from the radical and profound to the silly. The winning proposal was a plan for a hanging garden.
No matter what its future will be, I wish I could’ve been there when it was new. Whenever I’m in Flushing Meadow Park now, I think of the Fair and how different my childhood playground looked then.
Especially the Pavilion.
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Did you see the New York State Pavilion during the World’s Fair?